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Cowardly or Canny?

My cousin and his girlfriend were the victims of an attempted carjacking. Two armed men ordered them into the car. As one assailant was climbing into the backseat on the driver's side, my cousin grabbed the keys and ran, leaving his girlfriend. He quickly reached an emergency phone, and the police responded within minutes to find that the carjackers had fled, leaving his girlfriend unharmed. Did he do the right thing? C.D., Los Angeles

This does put your cousin in a bad light, but there is an upside: think of the money friends and family save by not having to buy wedding presents.

The question is this: Did his 100-meter dash add to her peril? If not, then ethically it's a neutral act. (Though it might not warm her heart; from her perspective, "run for help'' may be indistinguishable from "run away.'') He may have increased his safety, however, by decreasing hers. And that would be unethical.

If they could not simply surrender the car and if she could not join him in flight, your cousin's options were limited. Had he spotted a cop nearby, he would have been right to increase his girlfriend's danger momentarily to greatly raise the odds of saving her and himself. But that was not so. And his few minutes' absence was a long time to abandon her to the tender mercies of the carjackers.

Photo

Credit
Drawing by Christoph Niemann

I'm reluctant to be hard on him. Few of us would know what to do at such a moment, and it's unclear that he could have protected her had he remained, but I believe he made the wrong decision. Its happy outcome was the unpredictable result not of his being prudent but of the carjackers being jittery.

A bicycle locked to a pole near my house was untouched through the fall and winter. When spring came, I balanced the lock so it would be in a different position if the bike were moved. It wasn't. Eventually I broke the lock and now ride the bike almost daily. Was it ethical to steal something that had clearly been abandoned by its owner? Kate Clifford, Philadelphia

The trick is determining if something is in fact abandoned. There are an awful lot of cars stashed by the curb with nobody near them. To your credit, you showed due diligence. You observed the bike for nearly a year and used a cunning spy-movie trick to see if it had been ridden when you weren't around. (I trust you went home now and then, at least to shower and sleep.) And all city dwellers know that bikes are sometimes leashed to poles and left to fend for themselves. What's more, you did your neighbors a service by removing what had been a nuisance.

Here in New York, the police respond similarly to complaints about an abandoned bike. In some precincts, according to Noah Budnick of Transportation Alternatives, "if the bike is damaged or shows signs of obvious disuse, the police will tag it with a notice saying that the bike will be removed in two weeks if it is not moved. After two weeks, the officers return, usually with Department of Sanitation agents, and if the bike is unmoved, they clip the lock and cart the bike away." In this, they and you act ethically.

Send your queries to ethicist@nytimes.com or The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 229 West 43rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10036, and include a daytime phone number.